Last February, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced a new carbon tax, effective in 2012, the details of which she finally released last Sunday, July 10. If she succeeds in rolling her plan out, Australia will be the first country in the world with an economy-wide tax on carbon emissions. But Australia's economy relies heavily on carbon-intensive agriculture and mining exports and opposition to Gillard's plan has been intense. Now the Prime Minister and her Labor party are struggling to hold onto power as the fight over carbon taxing threatens not just to derail Gillard's plan but to topple Australia's government.

Gillard's unpopularity is linked to her government's efforts to put a price on carbon emissions. It shows how much public opinion has changed on climate change in the last few years (fairly or unfairly). A few years ago it was electoral poison to not be supporting a price and limits on carbon emissions, while today in Australia it is lethal to put a cap and trade regime in place.

The change in political atmosphere is not just due to a growing scepticism about the science. A majority of the public still think human activity contributes to global warming. I think it is more that the global recession has meant most voters are focused on making ends meet in the next few years, and are not focused on harmful effects which are potentially decades or longer away.

Now let us try for a moment to realise the nature of that abode of the damned, Gillard's carbon-taxed Australia. That Australia will be a dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell. Not so in Gillard's carbon-taxed Australia. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners will be heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which will be four thousand miles thick and where the damned will be so utterly bound and helpless that they'll not even be able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it. All the filth, offal and scum of the world shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. O, how terrible will be the lot of these wretched beings, Australians, under a carbon tax! The blood will seethe and boil in their veins, their brains will boil in their skulls, their bowels will be red-hot mass of burning pulp.

That the Greens have been able to get to where they are today in less than 20 years is partly because of their ability to draw away urban voters who may traditionally have voted for Labor, said John Wanna, a political science professor at Australian National University in Canberra.

“They’ve been riding a wave, really, left open to them because Labor is dominated by the unions and the unions aren’t very environmentalist,” he said.

BINDING contracts to pay high-polluting electricity generators to close - including in the Latrobe Valley - could be in place by next June, hindering the Coalition's promise to dump the carbon tax.

The Age believes government officials have begun preliminary discussions with the owners of power stations qualifying for the program to shut down 2000 megawatts of coal-fired power generation under Labor's carbon price scheme.

Senior government sources said yesterday the aim was to have contracts - binding on future governments - in place with generators before the carbon price starts in July 2012.